softest quilt I’ve ever felt.” It was like a cozy, cottony hug. She eyed as much of it as she could see, tucked as it was around her. “It’s gorgeous, too.” The design was subtle but complex, made of tiny triangles that varied only slightly in color or pattern. You had to look closely to see the variation.
“My mom made it. She always said you shouldn’t treat quilts like pristine works of art. That you should wash them a lot so they get nice and soft. Use them, and not just inside. She was always dragging them around to use as picnic blankets or camping bedding.” He served her a piece of fish as he spoke and nudged the salad bowl toward her.
“Oh my God, this is good,” she said after her first bite of fish. “It’s different from before, I think?”
“Yeah. This is pickerel. It’s also good lightly breaded and panfried. I’ll do it that way next time, but I’m trying to make the most of the last days of grilling season.”
Next time. She loved the way he kept saying that. And the amazing thing was, she was pretty sure there would be a next time regardless of whether they ever got around to sleeping together this evening. It ratified her feelings that things weren’t going to get weird. Jake was a person who could roll with the punches.
And, slightly surprisingly, she seemed to be, too.
Look at her. The life reset had yielded a new, flexible personality and a man-god best friend with benefits.
“I had a string of failed relationships before Rufus,” she said, steering them back toward the topic at hand, even though he’d given her an out. “Going all the way back to high school. They almost always ended with the guy complaining that I didn’t have enough time for him. Which I can’t really argue with. School always came first, in high school and in undergrad, and then med school and my residency? I mean, forget it. You work a million hours a week. My last boyfriend before Rufus told me I was not cut out to be someone’s girlfriend. He issued this ultimatum, saying I had to meet him halfway or he was going to leave me.”
“What did that mean?”
“I don’t know. I interpreted it to mean I should cook more, do more around the house. And to be fair, I really wasn’t doing my share.”
“What did this guy do? For a living, I mean.”
“He was a junior high school science teacher.”
“Well, that’s just stupid. You’re working more than he is—and he’s not working at all in the summer—he should do the cooking.”
“Well, isn’t that enlightened of you?” she teased.
“I’m serious. You figure out what optimizes the collective well-being, maybe taking into account what everyone does and doesn’t like to do, and you do that. That’s why I was staying home with Jude.”
Man. Jake Ramsey, if he could ever get over his perma-grief, would make someone a great husband someday.
“So what happened?” he asked.
“Despite my best intentions and my pledge to improve, I really wasn’t doing half the housework. And then one time we had sex, and I fell asleep in the middle of it. And he left me.”
He cracked up.
“In my defense, I had just come off a twenty-four-hour shift. The last thing I wanted to do was have sex.”
He furrowed his brow and paused with a bite of fish halfway to his mouth. “So why did you?”
“I don’t know. I was trying to meet him halfway?” She could sense that he was gearing up to object to this concept, and he wasn’t wrong. Maybe post-reset Nora wouldn’t have been so eager to please at any cost, but she didn’t really want to get into it. “Anyway, my point is, then I met Rufus, and all of a sudden the scheduling stuff wasn’t such a big deal, because he was as busy—and tired—as I was. He got it. None of my boyfriends before had been doctors. So I thought, Hey, maybe my previous problems were just occupational hazards. But then…” She shrugged. He could fill in the rest. He knew about Perky Chloe. “I guess it shook my confidence.”
He rolled his eyes. “Fair enough, but I think the moral of this story is that Rufus is an idiot.”
She liked that he said idiot. Everyone else had said something on the spectrum from jerk (Erin) to asshole (Grandma). Idiot, though, framed Rufus’s behavior not as something mean so much as something stupid. Like his nuking